ABSTRACT
Eccentric and esoteric, Park Güell was a private extravaganza built between 1900 and 1914. Located on the edge of the Collserola hills above Barcelona, the principal city of Catalonia, it was conceived as the centrepiece of a sixty-house garden suburb but became a laboratory that owner Count Eusebi Güell y Bacigalupi (1846–1918), designer Antonio Gaudí y Cornet (1852–1926) and ceramicist Josep Maria Jujol (1879–1949) fashioned into a fantasy world of structural and decorative symbols, metaphors and allegories from the worlds of Catholicism, Catalan regionalism, classicism, mythology, epidemiology, alchemy, astrology and Freemasonry. Only three of the houses were ever built.
